He fell into the room head first, tumbling forward, the sudden freedom bringing exquisite relief to his tortured joints. He sat up, blinded by the light from a single unshaded bulb which swung from a cellar roof. He held up a hand to protect his eyes, looking round at the roughly plastered walls. The room had a single door at the top of a short flight of stone steps. He forced his eyes shut, trying to restore normal vision, but the bright rectangle of the light he had crawled towards impinged on everything, alternately electric red and Day-Glo blue.
He held his head in his hands and waited, listening, crouched down on his knees. There was a sound, a scuffling, sticky noise close at hand. When he opened his eyes at last he saw books: hundreds of books in an assortment of old bookshelves covering three walls of the spacious cellar. Along the fourth stood filing cabinets, industrial size, each with a neat printed card in the slot provided on the face of each drawer. A threadbare carpet, mock Persian, almost covered the concrete floor.
Set at an angle in the centre of the room was a desk, in an exotic hardwood inlaid with dust, and behind it, in a captain’s chair, sat Dr Louise Beaumont. She brushed loose earth from her hair and returned to cleaning the pistol she held, working her fingers along the metal, easing out the grey-green clay of the moon tunnel.
Dryden, calculating, walked briskly to the steps, climbed them, and tried the door. It didn’t move a centimetre, so he banged loudly with his fist. Somewhere above he heard a clock chime.
When he turned back she was twisting a silencer onto the pistol barrel.
He thought of the noises he’d heard in the tunnel. ‘They’re just behind me. The police know too,’ he said.
‘Know what?’ she said, and Dryden could see she was sweating, her lower lip trembling despite the extraordinary force and confidence of the voice. She looked towards the tunnel opening, the rough rectangle surrounded by the ragged edge of the chipped-away bricks.
‘The tunnel’s collapsed,’ he said, knowing it had cut off her retreat, and his escape.
Dryden felt his knees give momentarily so he sat, abruptly, on the lower step.
‘You came back for the gun,’ he said.
There was silence then, but distantly they could hear the murmur of the crowd.
She put the gun down quickly on the desk. ‘That night,’ she said. ‘I heard you in the trench, coming. I thought – if they find the gun it’s over. We were right by the tunnel. It seemed the perfect place to hide it, above the head panels, where Jerome had said they’d stashed the stuff. I pushed it into the clay, embedded it like one of his precious Anglo-Saxon coins.’
She tried to stand but failed, her legs buckling, so she sank back into the seat. Dryden knew why the gun was on the table now, to disguise the shaking hands she held below the desktop.
‘You always knew about the tunnel, didn’t you?’ Dryden strained to hear movement above, his only route out.
‘Azeglio, the fool,’ she said. ‘He made Jerome promise not to tell me he was going down. But he told me, that last afternoon, when we were together for the last time. So I kept the secret. When Azeglio uncovered the body, as he knew he would, he thought I too would be fooled. That is why he is dead.’
Dryden forced himself to stand, dragging his feet on the cellar floor as he paced in front of her.
‘But you were in Italy. Why come to England?’
She shook her head, listening, calculating. ‘Liz – at the hospital – sent me a cutting from the local paper. You wrote it. About the body in the tunnel. She thought I would be interested, and I was.’
She moved her hand swiftly to the gun and put it quickly on her lap, the barrel and stock sticky with clay.
Dryden forced himself to talk. ‘And I thought it was all for the painting. For the money.’
She laughed, the sound catching in her throat and almost making her cry. ‘It’s about hatred. About a brother hating his brother; about a wife hating her husband. And all for love.’
He could see her eyes filling and he knew she was going to kill either herself or him. It would be herself, he guessed.
‘If you kill me, they’ll know,’ he said, instantly regretting the suggestion.
She fought to keep her composure, even her sanity. ‘If you live, they’ll know for sure.’ She laughed again, and this time there was no hint of a sob.
Dryden realized she was getting stronger, not weaker. This is why she’d been able to kill Azeglio.
She stood, trying to level the pistol. He saw her muscles tightening along her arm, the tanned skin twisting around the bone, and he knew he had guessed wrong. She was going to kill him.
A dog barked in the tunnel, a bolt slid back on the cellar door, and she pulled the trigger. Dryden heard the tiny sound, slightly gritty, and then the flash burnt into his eyes as he was thrown back against the wall, the ridges of the bookshelves cutting into his flesh.